


Legacy

by Prosodi



Category: Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: Dysfunctional Family, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-31
Updated: 2012-01-31
Packaged: 2017-10-30 10:01:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/330515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prosodi/pseuds/Prosodi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony is Howard's legacy - whether it's deserved or not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Legacy

i.  
"Tonight is about a legacy," says Tony.

There is a crowd of tens of thousands breaking against the stage like the waves which hum to the coast below his house. This thing is not unlike another and another and another, and this will make all the difference.

ii.  
It's after Rhodey takes the suit and after Tony takes a cold shower (it isn't to sober himself up; that kind of loses it's efficiency when you take a bottle in with you - and here, Tony thinks that he could be nailing some flirty blonde in one of the many back rooms instead of vomiting down the drain between hits of liquor. Except in another reality where everything is different except the points that matter, Tony will pass out on the bed before he even really gets all the way out of his pants. It's probably an insult to lose it when someone's going down on you - and he's not talking lose it in the good way, but in the way where you wake up fourteen hours later and it takes you another ten minutes to realize where you are, even when that place is inside your own house) -- he goes down to the garage and sits in the roadster. Just sits there with the bottle cradled between his knees, though he has the good sense to screw the cap back on.

He just got this thing off its blocks a few months ago and he doesn't want to ruin the interior. Not after he's worked on it for so many years.

Tony's chest hurts. He figures he's pretty much fucked and that's too bad.

iii.  
This is the beginning to lots of stories:

Once upon a time there was a man and a woman. They had a baby that grew into a boy who tied his shoes crookedly and who sometimes helped the house keeper make breakfast and who broke the coffee table in the living room by falling on it and who strung rubber bands between the knobs of his dresser drawers then pulled them out in degrees when his parents were away to make the sound of the bands hum differently. He re-wired the television.

Once, Howard Stark wanted so badly for his son to make the world a better place that he forgot he had one. He came home, he drank coffee and then bourbon while smoking on the porch. Sometimes his hand ghosted across the top of Tony's head and he said, "Hand me that wrench, look at this," as they opened engines together. "Pay attention," he said. "This is important to do right or it'll ruin everything."

And somehow none of that is going to matter - that he never says the things people are supposed to say, are obligated in one way or another to tell people. It doesn't matter that Howard Stark never takes his son fly fishing and that he instead sends his prodigy off to boarding school and then, when Tony turns out to be too smart for that, to MIT. It doesn't matter that he steps out of the graduation ceremony in the middle and comes back right at the end. It doesn't matter because eventually, some day, Tony is going to change the world.

And he does, because years in the future Tony will watch an old reel and let a collection of film grain convince him that he was born for it, that his father knew exactly what he was doing. And maybe that's wrong, but it's what matters in the end. Isn't it?


End file.
